Transportation Blog

Are Super Bowl planners getting the word out on transit service?

I’d say they could be doing a better job reaching the public. That’s judging from a letter to the editor we got from Carol Jablonski of Dallas. She wrote:

I have read about how concerned our public officials are about the celebrities and VIPs that are coming to the Super Bowl. I also read that that the “ordinary people” (who are paying $600 to $1,200 a ticket with their hard-earned salaries) are encouraged to use public transportation.

My relatives are “ordinary people” coming from Pittsburgh for the Super Bowl hoping for the experience of a lifetime. I am trying to figure out what the best way is to get them to the game. My inclination would be to send them on public transportation, but that is through the TRE.

Based on the online information, the TRE owns only 13 cars that seat 96 people per car. Even given standing room, I fail to understand how our public transportation system can handle more than a miniscule number of the people attending the Super Bowl.

Have additional arrangements been made for rail transportation? It would be welcome and informative if The Dallas Morning News and others in charge of Super Bowl arrangements could provide accurate information about the capacity of public transportation to the game. I could find no such information anywhere. At this point in time, I smell another Texas/OU public transportation disaster.

I have two takeaways from this:

– People who are trying to get useful information are having trouble finding it, which can only mean planners need to do a better job.
– The public is not going to forget the Texas-OU fiasco of 2009 when deciding whether public transport is reliable for a big event.

You can find information on the special game-day TRE service NOT by going to the DART or TRE websites or the Dallas CVB site; as of this writing there are no mentions I could quickly find in those places. You can find transit info on the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee website (which many people probably don’t know about).

Advice from me or anyone else who remembers DART’s Texas-OU performance involving overstuffed trains and horrible delays: Go ridiculously early if you want to ride rail to the game.

As for the question of added Super Bowl train capacity on the TRE, I don’t have the answer. I’ll shoot a link to this post over to the Council of Governments transportation department and DART, and they can put up a comment with added information.

It’s a good question: What’s the upper limit of rail passengers that the TRE can carry this Sunday?

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Transportation writer Brandon Formby and editorial writer Rodger Jones cover the subject from tollways to traffic, roads to rail. They invite tips and feedback from decision-makers and commuters alike.